Search Marketing Sage

Last week, Michelle shared some updates with Google+’s most used feature – Hangouts. This week I wanted to share how Google+ is tying itself into search results even more as it continues to grow and develop. Both this post and Michelle’s post show how Google has continued to combine Google+ with other Google products to allow users to get more relevant information faster.

If you aren’t already familiar with the Knowledge Graph, it is how Google attempts to “answer questions you never thought to ask” after you submit a search query. The Knowledge Graph appears in the upper right hand corner of the first page of search results and doesn’t yet appear for all queries. Google has an extensive program for nonprofits, which includes the Google Grants program and YouTube for Nonprofits, so it makes sense that they would want to continue to promote nonprofits to the best of their ability in organic search. On Google+, it was recently announced that the Knowledge Graph will further support searches for nonprofit organizations:

First, as a member of the Social Team at an SEO/ online marketing agency, it would be fairly negligent of me not to champion Google’s oft-maligned social network for its genuine SEO importance—I mean, it’s owned by Google. For all of the talk surrounding the increasing value of social indicators for search, we’d be naïve to think that the search engine giant’s personal social network would be left out of the equation. At minimum, having an up-to-date, fully optimized, keyword-heavy, image-heavy, and active (posting a couple times each day) Google+ page will help your brand get a more detailed Knowledge Graph showing in search. And if you’re still not quite convinced, be sure to take a look at our Google+ Business Benefits infographic to learn about even more benefits to your business.

With the preaching out of the way, the main purpose of this post was to introduce the new Hangouts, and get you to simply try them out. Hangouts replaces Google Talk, Google+ Messenger, and Google+ Hangouts’ classic video chats, providing the integrated messaging platform that Google had been missing.  There are so many features that make me think this could actually be the catalyst that changes the average individual’s perception of Google+ and leads them to start taking it seriously as a social network—we’ll just have to see if Google can push all of its Gmail/ Android users to get on board…

You have put a lot of time, effort and in some cases, money, into your website and the hard work is paying off – you have a respectable number of site visitors, an ever growing social presence, and your brand ranks high in search results. Life is good.

Then, for whatever reason, a rebrand has to take place. Maybe your company has changed directions or, as in my case, you move from a big city back to your hometown and your lifestyle blog, prominently featuring the city you’ve called home for two years, needs a makeover. I’m in the midst of rebranding my blog and along the way, I’ve learned a few things that will hopefully come in handy should you ever find yourself navigating a rebrand.

I’m keeping today’s post fairly short, but I wanted to address every social media marketer’s least favorite question: “how can we make this go
viral?” I know, it’s a recurring theme across every internet marketing blog in existence, but I promise, my post is a bit different…

Yes, I will echo the oft-repeated sentiment of many, because it’s important: you can’t, and we can’t, make anything go viral. With that out of the way, social media marketers can, however, provide you with the tools and the know-how to produce engaging, interesting content that resonates with your audience, and has the potential to be shared widely… but, just to reiterate,  we cannot make anything go viral.

So with that, I wanted to share a case study of a recent social campaign that encompasses each of the best practices we share with clients—especially our nonprofits, who often lack the marketing dollars of the for-profits they compete with for online real-estate—to help inform their social media marketing efforts.

A few weeks ago, Michelle Doty and I presented a brief introduction to Facebook Graph Search, and while the introduction of Facebook’s newest feature has offered many new ways of searching and finding information in Facebook and our social circles, it also opens a Pandora’s box of questions for marketers. This morning at SMX I attended the “Meet the Facebook Graph Search” session with Loren Cheng who works on the product team at Facebook to hopefully answer more of my questions.

Loren started by sharing Facebook’s mission: Make the world more open and connected. Facebook’s a way of staying connected… the entire social graph is actually enormous. Many things are in the graph, just waiting to be discovered, and Facebook believes the best way to find those things is through your friends.

One billion members are on Facebook, 240 billion photos and over one trillion connections. Even your own social graph may seem difficult to navigate. Social interaction is composed of three pillars of questions:

• What are my friends saying? Newsfeed answers this question.
• Who is this person? What is his/her story? Timeline answers this question.
• Who, of my friends, like what I like? Social Graph Search answers this.